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lectures > lectures autumn 2003

Aberrations in science: delusions and self-deception

Speaker: Professor Walter Gratzer
25th October 2003

There have been occasions in the history of science when the rules by which scientists normally govern their working lives have been suspended, and the principles of caution and critical evaluation have given way to self-delusion and irrationality.

Such episodes can engulf a sober and respectable scientific community like an epidemic. They can arise from personal vanity or unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility of an embarrassing error; from awe of a respected patron; from patriotic pride.

The worst consequences have come from political ideologies, which have imposed their own interpretations on scientific observations, as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In the end the bubble bursts, leaving a residue of acrimony, desperate excuses, red faces and ruined reputations.

Walter Gratzer read chemistry at Oxford and did his Ph.D. at the National Institute for Medical Research in London.

Apart from a period as a Research Fellow at Harvard and as Visiting Professor at Columbia, he has spent his working life at King's College London, on the scientific staff of the Medical Research Council, and as Lecturer in Biophysics and Professor of Biophysical Chemistry.

He is now Emeritus Professor.

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